Re: [Plplot-devel] New way to generate wxwidgets debug output

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

On 2016-12-20 08:55-0000 p.d...@gm... wrote:

> I made and pushed the change last night to use urandom over random,
but Pedro is probably correct, the getrandom() function may be the
best solution. I can make that change later today.

I agree that getrandom has a nice interface compared to what it wraps
(i.e., it also internally uses /dev/urandom with /dev/random as a fallback).
However, I am not convinced this is the way we should go now.

The problem is getrandom is Linux specific and only available for
newer Linux systems.  For example, I just did a complete search of all
packages I could install for getrandom, and it is not available on
Debian Jessie!

In contrast /dev/urandom seems to be available on virtually all Linux
systems and more important many Unix systems, and /dev/random is a posix standard I
believe, i.e., it should be available on all Unix systems as a
fallback if /dev/urandom is not available.  So I think we should stick
with the status quo here, and maybe revisit this a year or so from now
when likely getrandom will be a lot more common on at least Linux, and
maybe at the point it will have spread to other unices as well.  But
POSIX changes are slow...

Also, it is getting relatively close to release (still likely on
December 27th), and we finally have gotten one foot on dry land with
the long pause problem and Pedro's segfault issue so I would prefer we
not make further changes and instead test what we do have now with
appropriate comprehensive tests on systems with access to the needed
unix tools (bash, etc.), i.e., MinGW-w64/MSYS2 and Cygwin on Windows
and Linux, Mac OS X, and traditional Unix systems,

Alan

__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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